Natural order by integer in part of an array?

Asked May 04 '14 at 09:04

Active Mar 23 '17 at 15:19

Viewed 23 times

I have an array that containts these values:

Dancelesson 4 years

Dancelesson 5 years

Dancelesson 6 years

Dancelesson 2-3 years

Above is sorted by ascending order, but I want 2-3 years to be first (because 2 is before 4 years). Is there a function to achieve this? (I've tried natsort, natsort, natcasesort etc)

or would I have to create one myself for this purpose? (I guess I could cast the strings in the array to ints and then order them!?)

edited Mar 23 '17 at 15:19

Ivan Chaer

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asked May 04 '14 at 09:04

bestprogrammerintheworld

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What's the code for the array? `array('Dancelesson 4 years', '...', ...)`? – Mark Miller May 04 '14 at 09:08
@MarkM - why does that matter? I just want to sort an array in a specific way. – bestprogrammerintheworld May 04 '14 at 09:12
Have you tried `sort`? It should give desired result for your example – hindmost May 04 '14 at 09:12
@hindmost - yes I've tried that as well. The thing is that (I guess) the sort algorithm sorts the string based that 2-3 are larger then 6 (or 5 or 4). – bestprogrammerintheworld May 04 '14 at 09:15
@bestprogrammerintheworld Nevermind it probably doesn't. Just verifying that the elements are stored as strings the way you have it written. – Mark Miller May 04 '14 at 09:16
@bestprogrammerintheworld I can't understand what you need - ascending or descending order? – hindmost May 04 '14 at 09:17
@MarkM - yes it's purely strings in the array. – bestprogrammerintheworld May 04 '14 at 09:19
@hindmost - I want the array to be sorted in ascending order, BUT sort(), natsort() etc doesn't sort my array as I wished to. I want it be sorted like this: Dancelession 2-3 years, Dancelession 4 years, Dancelession 5 years and Dancelession 6 years. – bestprogrammerintheworld May 04 '14 at 09:20
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@bestprogrammerintheworld `sort()` works fine: http://ideone.com/HukKnO – hindmost May 04 '14 at 09:25
then your best best would be using usort and using your own custom sorting algorithm – Timur May 04 '14 at 09:28
Hmmm. Thanks !!! Nevermind. Forgive me for my stupidity. Of course it works fine. The issue was the ACTUAL array wasn't dancelession 2-3 BUT dancelession2 (not the same course). LOL. Forgive me for wasting your time. – bestprogrammerintheworld May 04 '14 at 09:28

Natural order by integer in part of an array?

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